If We Can, You Can

Author:

Alistair McLean

Business:

Activities Abroad

Published:

10/11/2008 11:14:00

For the first company the advertising was based around Sunday broadsheet newspapers. But then we realised that there was this little thing called the internet that was starting to make a bit of a splash.

In the second business, the entire marketing budget went into web marketing. We figured that the kind of people who wanted adventure holidays would be the kind of people who would embrace the internet. Whether by good judgement or sheer luck, that’s how we built our database.

One of the original travel companies who are ten times our size said to us, ‘You guys really stole the march on everybody with pay per click advertising and search engine listings. You realised before anybody else.’ We hadn’t actually realised that we’d realised before everybody else but there’s a global audience out there and that’s essentially where we got our market from.

Now though we’re looking at different ways of marketing. Everybody’s obviously caught up with us on the internet. Before, we would pay 25p to be in the top three for activity holidays on the search engine. Now we’re paying £1.25. It’s become incredibly expensive. Last year we spent £100,000 on pay per click advertising and the whole thing has become increasingly sophisticated so we’re actually reviewing the whole thing.